A ton of Flash users visit Adobe’s we site every month wondering about how to load an external SWF file from within another SWF. There are a lot of resources with answers to this question, and I recently realized our own TechNote on the subject was kind of old and crusty. A bunch of users who visited it were having some pretty obvious follow-up questions that weren’t answered by the TechNote as it was, such as:

How do I load more than one SWF?

How do I load a SWF into a specific location in the display list?

How do I resize the loaded SWF?

How do I set its X and Y location?

So I’ve attempted to answer these questions with an updated code sample and a set of sample files you can download from the TechNote.

I also added a bunch of links to quality resources that elaborate on loading content and on the display list:

Sample files for this TechNote. A set of 3 FLA and 3 corresponding SWF files, including a parent SWF and 2 SWFs that the parent loads.

Video tutorial: Preloading in ActionScript 3.0. By Lee Brimelow. A slightly more complicated example, showing how to make the parent SWF display information about the progress of loading the external SWF.

Flash Pro is a big tool, more like a hardware store. You can do a lot of things in it without ActionScript, but with AS, you can do infinitely more things. Just like with Flash Pro itself, there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the quantity of learning material out there for ActionScript 3.0. Learning ActionScript is itself a big task, and it requires learning some basic concepts of object-oriented programming, which isn’t necessarily hard, but for many people, it’s a whole new way of thinking that they haven’t had to do before.

Here are a few hand-picked resources for getting started with AS3 that hopefully will give new users confidence to try ActionScript and to know that they are looking at some of the best resources for learning it. These are all video tutorials.

Code Snippets and AS3 enhancements – Code snippets were introduced in Flash Pro CS5 and provide pre-written code that you can apply as a way to get a lot of basic functionality implemented without learning really any code. They are also a great way to begin learning ActionScript 3.0 because they are very small in most cases and reading them will quickly begin to shed some light on the conventions that are used.

ActionScript 101 with Doug Winnie – This is Doug’s show on Adobe TV. There are many, many episodes that go from the basic to more specific topics. Most of the episodes are 5-7 minutes long. A great free resource from a very good teacher with a manageable pace. Note that the episodes are listed in reverse chronological order (newest first) on the Adobe TV page.

One thing we see very often in the community are users wanting to know where to get started with the process of learning Flash Pro. We recently added a new learning guide to the Dev Center, which I’ll link to below. I’d also like to point out a few other quality tutorials that are great for new users.

The Flash Pro 5-Step Learning Guide provides a nice step by step approach to getting up to speed with Flash that not only tells you where to start, but also where to go second, third, fourth, etc. Following these suggestions should provide you with a nice route through the forest of Flash learning content out there.

Here are 2 good videos and a tutorial that are great places to start also:

Introducing Flash Professional – This video has a nice overview of Flash’s workflow basics, including using the workspace, creating and importing artwork, using symbols and the Timeline, and publishing SWF from your FLA files.

On thing that I have seen a lot in user-observation studies is that many people don’t understand how search engines work and thus don’t know how to enter search terms that are the most likely to get them the results that they want. This problem is compounded by the fact that when users get a long list of unhelpful search results, they start getting the impression that the info they need is so buried in the mire of the internet that they will never find it.

This post at LifeHacker should be helpful to many people who would like to understand how to get better results from their searches.The post contains a 3-minute video tutorial.

The Flash VM performs really well on mobile chipsets and I don’t see any evidence here to support the idea that Flash is slow on smartphones and tablets. High end videos are below par at the moment, but the 3.1 release of Honeycomb illustrates that firmware updates are the key to solving this issue.

His testing is quite thorough. Adobe paid for his time through his employer, EffectiveUI, having noticed his earlier benchmarking work. I feel confident that you will find his testing thorough and unbiased. Check it out at the link above.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Brian Rinaldi of Adobe has been posting a weekly list of high-quality, interesting posts from Flash platform community members at www.remotesynthesis.com. It’s a great way to keep up with the latest posts and stay focused on the good stuff. Thanks Brian. Keep ‘em coming.